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from the I-think-that-I've-read-this-tomorrow dept.
Physicists in Australia claim to have simulated time travel using fairly standard optical equipment on a lab bench. They say they have prepared photons that behave as if they are travelling along short cuts in space–time known as "closed time-like curves", and add that their work might help in the long-sought-after unification of quantum mechanics and gravity. Others, however, argue that the research does little or nothing to establish whether time travel is possible in nature.
Although everyday experience suggests the impossibility of travelling backwards or forwards in time, Einstein's general theory of relativity does not rule it out. The theory allows for loops in space–time called closed time-like curves that could be created by very powerful sources of gravity such as black holes. These structures would bring an object back to a place and a time that it had already passed through, typically via a short cut between the two separated regions of space–time known as a wormhole.
The extraordinary claim can be found at physicsworld, here.
The original paper was published at Nature Communications; an abstract is available at: http://arxiv.org/abs/1501.05014 with links to the full article available there.
[Editor's note: tip of the hat to the AC who provided better link information; this story has been updated accordingly.]
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 09 2015, @09:53AM
For arXiv links it is good practice to link to the abstract page (from the abstract page, the pdf — and in many cases also ps, if you prefer that — is a single click away, while getting from the PDF link to the abstract page is much harder (you have to copy/paste the link and then manually edit it by replacing /pdf/ with /abs/ and removing the .pdf extension). It also saves you a PDF warning because the abstract page is HTML. Moreover, if you remove the version part (v1 in this case) as well, you're guaranteed to always get the latest version (with links to the earlier versions on the page).
For the article in question, the abstract link is http://arxiv.org/abs/1501.05014v1 [arxiv.org], or http://arxiv.org/abs/1501.05014 [arxiv.org] for the latest version (which here is the same, as of this paper only one version currently exists on arXiv).
Oh, and the arXiv link does not go via Nature Communications. It goes directly to arXiv, as the URL tells. The article was published in Nature Communications (but is paywalled there; the link for the paper at Nature Communications is http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/140619/ncomms5145/full/ncomms5145.html [nature.com]), but that's independent from the fact that it is on arXiv (certainly Nature Communications didn't put it on arXiv — the authors did —, nor does it link there).
(Score: 2) by martyb on Monday February 09 2015, @01:27PM
Thank-you for the illuminating clarification -- the story has been updated accordingly!
Wit is intellect, dancing.